The opportunity to take these photos of the streets of Brockley in the snow, with the pavements empty of people and the streets almost empty of traffic, came to me unexpectedly at 2.45am last night. As I was about to go to bed, I noticed, through a window, that the outside world looked white, and, on closer inspection, discovered to my delight that it was snowing.

Five minutes later, I was dressed and venturing out into the night, discovering that the snow had been falling steadily for a few hours, and was settling, although I also discovered that it was very wet, and that the chances of it lasting beyond the morning were vanishingly remote. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, when the snow began falling on London — something that is not even necessarily an annual occurrence in the UK — I took a tour by bike around Brockley, my home in south east London, and also visited Ladywell, Lewisham and Greenwich, taking photos as the first snow fell.

I posted the first set of photos yesterday, and was planning to post the second set, featuring Greenwich, today, but then it began snowing again, more heavily than before, and I spent this afternoon on another photographic trip — first of all, taking my son sledging in Hilly Fields, the hill-top park in Brockley that is one of my favourite places to visit, and then cycling through Brockley and on, via New Cross, to Deptford, capturing one of my favourite urban environments in the snow. Read the rest of this entry »

This photo set, the 72nd in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, rather sprang upon me yesterday (January 18), when, while still sleep-deprived and rather jet-lagged after returning from my ten-day visit to the US to campaign for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on the 11th anniversary of its opening, I had to make a visit to my local hospital in Lewisham, in south east London — whose A&E Department, and other frontline services, are currently under threat of closure — and was thrilled, in an inner-child way, to discover that it was snowing.

After taking a few photos en route, I reemerged after an hour or so to find that the snow was still steadily falling, and so, after pushing my bike back up the hill to Brockley — to mend a puncture I had received during the short journey to the hospital — I set out to capture some photos of my wider neighbourhood in the snow, taking a well-worn route down the hill to Lewisham, along the River Ravensbourne to Greenwich, and then down to the River Thames and back, a two-hour journey, at the end of which I was half-frozen. Read the rest of this entry »

From Dunkeld, in Perthshire, in Scotland, beside the A9 (the major route through northern Scotland), the A822, a mixture of former drovers’ routes and military roads, heads west, and then south, for around 16 miles in total, ascending to forlorn, blasted heathland that is very dear to me. Every year, we — my wife, my son and I — visit my wife’s family in Edinburgh for Christmas, and every Boxing Day my wife and I leave our son with his grandparents, drive north to the Highlands, in Perthshire, and stay one night in a hotel. The following day, we return via this stretch of the A822, which passes through a particularly beautiful, but largely unknown part of the Highlands.

This landscape never fails to provide a reminder that, just around the corner from places where humans have settled for hundreds of years, or for millennia, are other places that have proven far more inhospitable. The highest pass on this road between Dunkeld and Crieff is a sublime example of this, where a strip of road runs across boggy, wind-swept land that has repulsed all those who have tried to tame it by living here. The road remains, as do electric pylons and, somewhere nearby, a wind farm, but no permanent settlements still stand. Read the rest of this entry »